When it comes to print in the air, FDM printing technology has a lot of challenges of course those objects are difficult to print, that’s why we need to add material support for the best printing quality.

Example of support material on a 3D printed object

Fortunately open-source save’s the day, there’s a free tool called << Meshmixer>> that will provide us an easiest solution for adding support material.

But when and why we need to add those support materials?

We need to generate support as the name says <> These kind of objects are hard to print, of course there is slicing softwares that allows us to add support material automatically on our objects, the main problem is the massive waste of filament on each 3d-print. Slicing software’s <<slic3r, cura=”” or=”” skeingorge=””>> are prepared to create this support material but here is the tricky part: these supports are pretty difficult to remove and as I said they waste a huge quantity of filament.

We can compare these software by adding on the same 3D model a support material.

Support material added on CURA

Support material added on Meshmixer

We can start adding support efficiently using MeshMixer by following these steps.

Click the button <<IMPORT>> then we search in our pc the 3D model that we need then click <<OPEN>>

Select the button import to upload your 3D model

Search your 3D model and upload it to Meshmixer

Depending on the complex of the 3D model Meshmixer I’ll takes to open, when our object is ready we click on the <<ANALISYS>> button.

Click on the button analyse

Now we click on the button <<OVERHANGS>>

Select the option overhangs

As you can see we will have different options for adding support material. One of the most important parts is <<ANGLE TRESH>> since this is the option that decided which areas will be supported and which are not. In our 3D model we are going to see red areas, those require support according to the value of <<ANGLETRESH>>

Sidebar editing options of support material

We can adjust this vale until we see that all trouble spots turned red.

Red areas that need support material

Then we click the button <<GENERATE SUPPORT>> now we wait for support material generated by Meshmixer, this will take a few seconds depending on the complexity of our 3D model.

Select the option generate support

Now we see the generated support, depending on the values of your <<ANGLE TRESH>> you might have unnecessary support, usually a value from 30 to 35 works pretty well.

You can click on <<REMOVE SUPPORT>> if you see that supports weren’t the best way, we can modify our parameters and click <<GENERATE SUPPORT>> to create them with new values.

After modifying the options according to our needs we click <<DONE>> to accept our changes.

Support added to your 3D model

You can click <<EXPORT>> to save your file, select the destination folder and name, also chose the format, the file is used normally STL ASCCII, but you can save it in another format if you need it.

Select your prefered extension

Now we can import our 3D model through any slicing software that we use as you can se below i’ll be using CURA for this 3D model.